You may not want to face this reality, but Teen Suicide are no longer “problematic” punks and it shows on the band’s new album, Nude descending staircase headless.

Chalk it up to the band cleaning up their act. Maybe it’s something that goes hand-in-hand with maturing as human beings or an embrace for refinement as an artist, but it’s been a long road for the Sam Ray-led band which has gone through numerous lineup changes — and even temporary name changes to appease the woke times of the moment — to ultimately get to a place where you can proudly brandish the name “Teen Suicide” on a t-shirt, look someone into the eye with a straight face, and say, “This band totally saved my life.”

Stability has helped, too. Over the last several years, Ray’s marriage to fellow artist, modern alt-pop purveyor, and original indie culture influencer, Kitty Ray, has been mutually beneficially toward both finding a grounding center in a chaotic universe with building their lives together, through sickness and in health. They’re not the same people today, though, nor should anyone be compared to the past versions of themselves.

Past work has always fed itself off such chaos through the nihilistically broken lo-fi punk tracks of the project’s early Tumblrcore lore days, which found many a misfit out their in the early stages of the Internet music vacuum. There’s a confidence that’s apparent here on the fifth full-length under the Teen Suicide banner — a “proper studio recording” — that puts faith in the process in the hands of glossed up indie-punk producer Mike Sapone (Oso Oso, Anxious) and hears them coming out the other end with their most tangible album to date.

The things you’ve always loved about the Rays’ work is still as evident as ever, however, even if spruced up around its once-rough exterior. These pages have already said this once, and they will say it again that without Sam’s penchant for asymmetry in his songwriting, the weirder sides of modern shoegaze and experimental indie rock wouldn’t be where they are today without a creative gonzo willing to risk it all for the art before it was cool to do so (for what it’s worth, the band allegedly is not a fan of shoegaze music.)

Maybe it’s simply the Berman in him which speaks to crafting his own ugly beauty. There’s the quiet-to-loud dramatic crash of opener “Anhedonia” tearing open a rift in the space-time continuum, and the grungy skid-outs of “Idiot” blasting into a spacey prog-rock exploration before hurling right back into the razor blades. Somebody’s getting a blowjob in the back of a Denny’s on the day a notorious murderer gets arrested in early moments of “Everything in my life is perfect”. On the Kitty-led “Spiders”, the band’s life-numbing lullaby opulence meets the teeth to gnash it all apart in its chorus, only to reemerge in vapory art pop-rock form in the vampire fangs of “Hypnotic poison”. It’s in the ear of the beholder to decide which side of light their art sees.

The cohesion in the Ray’s life partnership bleeds through in Teen Suicide’s creative maturation here fantastically just as well, punctuated especially on the palatably punky “Suffering (Mike’s way)” and the sheen noise-pop feedback of the electric ballad, “Kindnesses”. 17 years in at this point — a whole lot of fucking around in certain regards — that we’ve been on this wild ride with Sam Ray, Kitty Ray, and company, it’s great to hear that the “find out” stage of their existence hears them coming to terms with the chaos in what can be best described as finding their own version of peace in who they are.

Highlights: “Suffering (Mike’s way)”, “Spiders”, “Everything in my life is perfect”

Teen Suicide’s Nude descending staircase headless will be released April 17th on Run for Cover Records.

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